by Peter May
He turned to Dr Castelli. Perhaps now it was time to confront the truth. ‘So what do you think happened?’ he said. ‘With Choy and Blume.’
She shook her head. ‘Who knows? Stein-Francks were chasing down a vaccine. Trying to get ahead of the game. But there were plenty of others doing the same. After all, whoever could produce an effective vaccine would make billions. You know, the EU alone has over a billion euros set aside annually to buy in vaccines and antivirals in the event of a pandemic.’ She gazed off across the water. ‘But they could only produce a vaccine ahead of the game by artificially creating a version of the virus that would transmit easily from person to person. Somehow the genie got out of the bottle. Choy must have got infected. God knows how. She went with her school to Sprint Water during the October break and passed it on unwittingly to hundreds of others.’
Dr Castelli sucked in a deep breath. ‘The thing about kids is, they’re just about the most effective incubators you can get. And they’re great at passing on infection. Most adults are infectious from just before the onset of symptoms, and then for four or five days afterwards. Kids shed virus from six days before symptoms, until as long as twenty-one days after. They are walking time bombs. They have no idea they have it, but they’re passing it on to everyone they meet – when they talk, cough, sneeze. You touch stuff they’ve touched, and you’re infected. Incubation is usually one to three days, and the average person will infect one-point-four people. Kids’ll do better than that, and in closed communities they spread the virus like wildfire.’
‘So a school camp with a couple of thousand other kids is just about the worst place to send an infected child?’ MacNeil said.
‘If you were a bioterrorist, you could hardly have picked a better scenario.’
‘But Stein-Francks aren’t bioterrorists.’
‘No, they’re just trying to make money. But this time they made a bigger killing than they expected. Millions of people are going to die because somehow, somewhere along the way, they screwed up. And Choy would have been the living proof of it. Destroy her, you destroy the evidence.’
MacNeil forced himself to focus on what Dr Castelli was saying, to try to follow her logic. ‘I don’t understand. Surely she has the same virus as everyone else, so that wouldn’t prove anything.’
‘No. Her virus is different, Mr MacNeil. You told me yourself that the lab said Choy’s version of H5N1 had been genetically engineered.’
‘That’s right.’
‘So it’s different from the one that infected everyone else.’
‘How’s that possible?’
‘Because it mutated.’ Dr Castelli shrugged her shoulders as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Which it was. ‘The flu virus does it all the time – antigenic shift, reassortment, recombination. That’s why the vaccine that Stein-Francks produced didn’t work. Of course, they’d have known the virus was bound to mutate, but not as much as it did. And we had no idea that the virus that’s killing everyone had evolved from something man-made.’ She waggled a finger at him. ‘But here’s the thing. We know that Choy was at the epicentre of the pandemic, and if we’d been able to compare her virus with the one used to produce the Stein-Francks vaccine, we’d have known straight away where it came from. As good as a fingerprint. Don’t you see? That’s why they had to get rid of her.’
They were motoring up King’s Reach now, Waterloo Bridge ahead of them, the South Bank Centre to their left. Already they could see the Eye dwarfing the buildings on the south side of the river, dark, silent and still, reflecting city lights against a black sky. There was no way MacNeil could have known that Amy was a prisoner in the topmost capsule, held there by the man he had pulled from a burning car on Lambeth Bridge two hours earlier. What he did know was that once they had passed the Royal Festival Hall, and gone under the Hungerford Bridge, they would be visible to anyone watching the river from the Eye. But Blume would not be expecting them to arrive by boat. He would be on the far side of the wheel watching the road. If they cut their motor, and made a silent approach to the pier, then they might be able to catch him, and any accomplice, unawares.
As the boat passed beneath the new footbridges suspended from either side of the rail bridge carrying trains into Charing Cross, he pulled Dr Castelli’s wires apart and the motor died. They emerged silently into the short stretch of water leading down to the pier immediately opposite the Ministry of Defence.
Two girdered walkways led out from either side of the base of the wheel to the Eye’s landing stage. A large pleasure cruiser was tied up there, bobbing gently on the rise and fall. MacNeil looked up at the vast structure soaring above them. It was only when you got this close that the full scale of it made its impact. He could see a light in the control hut at the far side of the boarding and disembarkation area, but there was no sign of life.
He steered the boat gently into the pier and jumped out to tie its lanyard to the white railing that ran along its length. The little boat bumped and scraped along the edge of the pier. He knelt down beside it. Dr Castelli thought he was going to give her a hand out, but instead he whispered, ‘I want you to stay here.’ She was going to protest, but he cut her off. ‘These people are killers,’ he said. ‘No messing.’
She seemed resigned and leaned back into the boat to retrieve the rifle they had taken from the guard on the Isle of Dogs. ‘You’ll need this, then.’
But he just shook his head. ‘You keep it. If anyone comes near you, shoot them.’
‘What if it’s you?’
He gave her a look. ‘Make an exception.’
‘Okay.’
He swung himself over the rail and trotted up a covered ramp to the walkway at the south end of the pier. There, he stopped and peered towards the base of the wheel. The four huge red motors, whose rubber wheels worked like cogs to make the big wheel turn, were still. Apart from the light glowing in the control hut, there was still no sign of life. MacNeil emerged from the shadow of the ramp and felt vulnerable beneath the clear Perspex of the walkway as he covered the thirty or so yards to the embankment at a gentle run. As he passed beneath it, he glanced up at a spiral staircase climbing into darkness overhead, maintenance access to the vast motors suspended above. Ahead, a tubular gate barred his further progress. It rattled as he climbed it and dropped down on the other side. The ramps that zigzagged up to the boarding platform – where thousands had once queued daily to experience the thrill of the ride – seemed oddly haunted in their emptiness. He heard the wind as it sang through the taut spokes of the wheel, and rattled the naked branches of trees on the open concourse. Massive cables, the thickness of a man’s leg, swooped overhead to anchor the structure firmly in concrete. There were a couple of circular booths, all closed up. A café terrace, long deserted; beyond, a playpark sadly forlorn in the absence of the children’s voices which had once animated it.
Blume was standing by a statue raised to the memory of the International Brigade, who had volunteered to help the Spanish people in their fight against fascism. Fists raised in the air, faces turned to heaven. A quarter of them had died. He turned, caught completely off-guard by the sound of MacNeil’s voice. ‘You’ve got thirty seconds to tell me what you’ve done with her before I break your neck.’
His tension gave way to a smile, almost of relief. ‘Well, that would be very foolish of you, Mr MacNeil. Because she’ll break a lot more than her neck if anything happens to me.’
‘Where is she?’ MacNeil was disturbed. He had made certain that Blume was completely alone before making his approach. And yet, why would Blume have exposed himself like this, on his own and unprotected, unless he felt confident that he had an edge on MacNeil?
Blume tipped his head back and looked up into the sky. ‘She’s up there,’ he said. And for a moment MacNeil didn’t understand, until he turned and followed Blume’s eyeline and realised he was talking about the wheel. Blume smiled at M
acNeil’s confusion. ‘Right at the very top,’ he said. ‘Best seat in the house, absolutely free of charge. But it’s a long way down – if you’re a bad boy.’
MacNeil stared at him, every fibre of his being urging him to do this man physical damage. It took a supreme effort of will to control himself. ‘What do you want?’
‘I want to know what you know, and who else knows it.’
MacNeil’s eye fell on the inscription engraved in the black marble plinth of the statue. They went because their open eyes could see no other way. He said, ‘I know there was some kind of accident. That Choy got infected with the flu virus you were working on. That this whole pandemic is happening because you people got careless.’
Blume rolled his eyes and shook his head. ‘Is that what you think?’ he said. ‘Is it really? How charitable.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, it wasn’t an accident, Mr MacNeil. We infected poor little Choy quite deliberately. And we sent her to Sprint Water knowing – no, hoping – that she was going to trigger a pandemic.’
Whatever MacNeil might have expected to hear, it hadn’t been this. Blume’s simple confession was breathtaking in its scale. To the extent that MacNeil couldn’t think of anything to say, except, ‘Why?’
Blume sighed. ‘It’s a long and painful story, Mr MacNeil. Stein-Francks was on the verge of ruin. A catastrophic collapse. And it had all been going so well. A certain amount of money had, shall we say, changed hands. Certain officials at the World Health Organization had declared FluKill as the drug of choice against the bird flu pandemic that everyone was predicting.’ He smiled wistfully. ‘Which didn’t please our competitors at Roche. Basically, we put Tamiflu out of business.’ He folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the International Brigade. ‘All the major Western countries were putting in orders. And I’m talking billions. Of course, you have to speculate to accumulate. And so we invested hugely in production. We had to increase output to meet demand. We started building a new production facility in France. We put all our eggs in the one basket – or in this case, the one nest. But it seemed like such a sure thing. Everyone wanted FluKill. And then . . . well, then, the Vietnamese and the Cambodians and the Chinese started killing millions of birds. Millions! The economic damage was unthinkable. But they did it. And in the course of a season, the threat began to fade. The bird flu was passing, the scare stories started disappearing from the columns of the press. Even the WHO became distracted by other issues. And governments all over the world suddenly decided that they had other priorities for the money they had earmarked for FluKill. Orders were cancelled. Others never materialised. Stein-Francks was all but finished, Mr MacNeil. Oh, we still had plenty of money. The trouble is, it was in all the wrong places. Mostly in a product nobody wanted to buy any more.’
Understanding dawned on MacNeil, like mist clearing on an autumn morning. ‘So in the absence of a market for your drug, you decided to create one.’
Blume nodded slowly. ‘That pretty much sums it up. We knew we were playing with fire, but we really did think we could control it. Produce a version of H5N1 that would spread easily amongst humans, and then produce the vaccine that would prevent them from getting it. Not, of course, before all those orders for FluKill had been fulfilled. Naturally, we knew the virus would mutate. But we figured it would almost certainly still come within the compass of the vaccine. That, I’m afraid, was where it all went wrong.’
He looked at MacNeil, and the big Scotsman saw regret in his eyes. But MacNeil knew that it wasn’t regret for all those lost lives. Blume was only sorry that it ‘all went wrong’ for the same simple commercial reasons that had motivated him in the first place. ‘Millions of people are going to die,’ MacNeil said. ‘Millions already have.’
Blume breathed his exasperation. ‘What difference does it make? One life, a million, ten million. It’s just a matter of scale.’
‘You’re right,’ MacNeil said. ‘But only because each individual life is important. And when it’s you, or someone close to you, then it’s personal.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Like losing a son.’
Blume looked at him, and for the first time his self-confidence visibly wavered. ‘I’m sorry about that,’ he said.
‘No, you’re not. You killed him. As surely as if you’d taken a gun and put a bullet in his head. As surely as you killed that little Chinese girl and stripped the flesh from her bones. Your own daughter!’
Blume blew air through contemptuous lips. ‘She wasn’t my daughter. Not even my adopted daughter. Her paperwork will tell you that she was adopted by Mr and Mrs Walter Smith, whoever they might be. In fact we bought her. In the international marketplace. It’s amazing how cheaply people can be bought these days. Literally. And children with such disfigurement, well, they cost pennies.’
MacNeil pictured the head that Amy had fashioned from the child’s skull, and wondered what miseries she had known. Discarded by her natural parents, bought and sold, smuggled across borders. God only knew what kind of treatment she had suffered at the hands of the men and women who had so ruthlessly exploited her. And then, suddenly, to have found herself living in an affluent London suburb, attending the local school, being sent on a holiday to Sprint Water. She must have thought she had died and gone to heaven. Only to be infected by a deadly flu, and when it failed to kill her, murdered by the very people she had probably come to trust.
‘She was supposed to die from the flu,’ Blume said, ‘and be cremated with all the rest. How could any of us have predicted that she would survive it? We couldn’t afford to have her around, living proof of what we’d done. Especially with that woman from the Health Protection Agency poking around.’
‘You’re not human,’ MacNeil said. He took a step towards him, and Blume pulled a small handgun from his coat pocket. He pointed it unsteadily at the policeman.
‘That’s close enough,’ he said. ‘There’s not going to be any negotiating with you, Mr MacNeil, is there?’
MacNeil felt his own lips trembling with anger. ‘No. There’s not.’
‘Then I’m just going to have to kill you.’
‘Aye, I guess you are.’ A movement in his peripheral vision made him glance to his right as the tiny figure of Dr Castelli stepped determinedly out from behind the statue and swung the butt-end of her rifle at Blume’s head. It caught him a bruising blow just above the temple and sent him sprawling to the ground. His gun rattled away across the cobblestones.
‘You despicable little shit!’ she said. ‘You killed all these people for money! I can’t believe you did that. You . . . you sent that child amongst us, to infect us with your abomination, like some poor little angel of death. You . . . you . . .’ She had no more words to express her anger, and instead she wrestled the rifle to her shoulder and fought to point it clumsily at Blume. He dragged himself up on to one elbow and raised a hand as if that might protect him from the bullet. ‘No, don’t,’ he shouted.
But MacNeil stepped in and pushed the barrel of the rifle up in the air and took it away from her. ‘Don’t you want to kill him?’ Dr Castelli raged. It was hard to imagine such anger and indignation seething within such a small frame. ‘He killed your boy.’
But MacNeil just shook his head. ‘I don’t want revenge,’ he said. ‘I want justice. I want him to face the consequences of his actions. I want him to face a jury of his peers, the verdict of humanity. I want him to spend the rest of his life rotting in a prison somewhere, with every single hour of every single day to reflect on his lack of it.’
Dr Castelli sucked in a deep breath and pulled a face. ‘I couldn’t get the goddamned thing to fire anyway.’
MacNeil said, ‘It helps if you take off the safety.’
A single shot rang out, and MacNeil heard Dr Castelli gasp. He whipped around to see Blume still on the ground. But he had retrieved his gun and fired it.
Now he turned it towards MacNeil and pulled the trigger again. Nothing happened. He tried once more. Still nothing. He threw it away and staggered to his feet and began sprinting towards the wheel.
Dr Castelli fell back against the statue and sat down heavily. Her right hand was flung across the left side of her chest, and there was blood oozing through her fingers. ‘I’m shot,’ she said, shocked that it should have happened so simply.
MacNeil knelt down beside her. ‘What can I do?’
‘Go after him.’
‘I can’t leave you like this.’
‘It missed my heart or I’d be dead,’ she said. ‘And I’m still breathing, so I figure it missed my lung, too. Go!’
MacNeil did not need a further invitation. He turned and ran after Blume. After all, he still had Amy. And presumably she wasn’t up there in that capsule on her own.
But as he approached the wheel he realised he’d lost sight of Blume. He ran up the ramp to the control room. It was empty. And then the clatter of feet on metal drew his eyes up to the twin spiral staircases that flanked the huge motor on the north-east side of the Eye. Blume was running up the left-hand spiral, up towards the outer rim of the wheel, forced to take small, awkward steps. MacNeil went after him. But by the time he was on the spiral itself, Blume had already transferred to the circular ladder which ran around the outside contour of the wheel. MacNeil stared up at him incredulously. The man was insane. Evidently he thought he could climb all the way up to the top of the wheel to get to the pod where Amy was being held. MacNeil was left with no choice but to go after him, whether he liked it or not.
At the top of the spiral he looked back down and saw Dr Castelli on the ramp below. She was supporting herself on the rail and gazing up at him. ‘See if you can start this thing!’ he shouted, and he turned and swung himself on to the inside curve of the ladder. He tipped his head back and looked up. Blume was eighty feet or more above him, scrambling from rung to rung like a man possessed. MacNeil started to climb, and his hands stung from the burns beneath his bandages.